In the Heart of the Woods | The Blair Witch Project at 25
Moby Dick ends – spoilers for a 150-year-old novel – with its obsessive Captain Ahab pulled into the drowning deep by the object of his vengeful pursuit. The crew of The Blair Witch Project are a much smaller crew than that of the Pequod, but their goal and obsessive leader are much the same.
Moby Dick was not the Great American Novel of its time and was only recognised as such much later on. Not so with Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s film which was an instant success in 1999 and twenty-five years later remains one of cinema’s great cultural touchstones. It is both a classic American story, a product of its time and an endlessly compelling tale of hubris and vulnerability.
In October 1994 three student filmmakers – Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard – disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found…
So goes maybe the most iconic introduction since Star Wars. The key sentence is the last. The Blair Witch Project was not the first found footage horror film, but it was the one that brought the format to wider attention. Soon after the film stormed the 1999 summer box office a slew of found footage horror films were made over the next twenty-five years ranging from the dreadful – Grave Encounters – to the dread-inducing – Noroi: The Curse. They were, all of them, chasing a dragon that could never be caught. The Blair Witch Project was special after all.
The marketing team behind the film had the cast sign contracts where they agreed not to appear in anything for a year after the film’s release. In the promotional materials they were either listed as missing or deceased. It was advertised as being completely real with a website that hosted police reports and interviews. At film festivals flyers were handed out and pleas by the filmmakers were made asking for information on the three students at the heart of the film. The initial screening run had no end credits leaving audiences wondering if they had just watched a recording of a real nightmare.
Of course, it was all fake and this hyper-successful, pre-viral marketing campaign would reap dividends for the film while leaving its cast out in the cold. Heather Donahue changed her name in 2020 and has been very vocal about the effect starring in one of the most profitable films of all time under her birth name had on her. She bore the brunt of viewers’ often misogynistic hatred of her character.
None of the three main cast members ever received much in the way of financial compensation for their roles in perhaps the last groundbreaking horror film of the 20th Century. Though Mike and Josh, who also used their real names, still act, it remains unsettling how none of these three fantastic actors were ever properly paid despite enduring cold and wet conditions and improvising all their dialogue while never really knowing what was going to happen to them at night.
Unfortunately, some of these unethical conditions are what make the film such a hauntingly tense watch. Heather, Mike and Josh are closer to colleagues or acquaintances when the film begins. As The Blair Witch Project goes on, we witness these physically close but emotionally distant relationships crumble beneath the pressures of surviving. Small incidents such as noises heard in the night snowball into larger ones like the discovery of twig totems and human teeth. These moments build and build until one final act of betrayal wipes any sense of hope from the film.
The characters were already lost by this point, but the deliberate loss of the map by one of them is as devastating as the death of Queequeg late in Moby Dick. Still, like Captain Ahab and his crew, Heather, Mike and Josh have no choice but to press on. But where Ahab’s thirst for vengeance is what drives him it’s Heather’s need to document their findings that pushes them past the point of no return.
At first Heather seems just that bit more dedicated to the task of making this student documentary. The hiring of Josh as the team’s sound man and the additional film camera speak to the fact that Heather takes this project a bit more seriously than other student filmmakers might. The variety of interview subjects and amount of archive material they go through is also a clue that Heather has something to prove either to herself, a teacher or an unknown party. This is reason enough as to why she keeps filming right to the very end.
It’s a common complaint in found footage films and it’s always phrased as some variation of “Why don’t they just drop the camera and run?” I don’t have an answer for every found footage film, the glut of them in the early to late 2000s is reason enough to question this often deployed and rarely explained trope, but I do have an answer for The Blair Witch Project. By the final act of the film, an overwhelming sense of doom lingers over the surviving characters. They are afflicted with the knowledge that the only things that may survive this nightmare are the tapes and film reel. Though none of them say it outright it’s clear that the footage will hopefully go some of the way to explaining what happened to them and so they keep rolling.
In a moment of stunningly vulnerable acting Mike berates Heather for her hubris – another echo of the Ahab and Starbuck dynamic – snapping the refrain “You wanted to make movies Heather” again and again until she snaps back. “Just fucking stop,” she cries. “It’s because it’s all I have left, OK?”
What exactly is she saying here? Does she know she’s trekking toward certain death either by starvation, exposure or some even more horrifying fate? Is it how she started the trip, with nothing left but the desire to make something? A testament to her abilities that others doubted? We’ll never really know. Nevertheless, we can understand her reasons for not dropping the camera and heading for the hills. If death was coming for me in an isolated, hostile place and all I had was a camera then I think I would cling to the cold comfort that at least there would be a record of what happened.
The maelstrom that eventually swallows the Pequod and her entire crew, save narrator Ishmael, was avoidable – and so too is the climax of The Blair Witch Project. Like Ahab, Heather is pulled into dark, unfathomable depths by the subject of her obsession. The difference is that only Heather sees what eventually attacks her.
Film is a visual medium but that doesn’t mean we should see everything. Some mysteries don’t need to be solved and though the 2016 sequel, Blair Witch, would show audiences what the titular creature looked like I’d argue that what’s in your head is far worse than what’s on screen.
The power of suggestion is The Blair Witch Project’s lasting legacy. What exactly is stalking Heather, Mike and Josh? What exactly is Heather trying to prove? Back in 1999 the film dared to suggest that the events within were real and audiences had watched the closest thing to a snuff film ever legally made. In the years that followed every found footage movie would chase the success of The Blair Witch Project with only a few achieving a similar level of fame.
Much like Melville’s Great American Novel, Myrick and Sanchez’s film turned into its own white whale with thousands of obsessives chasing a success that could never be repeated, a secret that could never be told.
